I never thought I’d be the one to say it’s funny how life is, but to be honest — that’s the best and only way to put recent developments. My year has been nothing but a roller coaster. I have never felt more out of control, more anxious; I simply did not buy a ticket to this growing up ride that I was practically thrown into.

And thus, I made plans and started having some mild form of visions and long term agenda of what I wanted for myself. The best laid plans never work out, and yet we must continue to pursue them with passionate and almost blind vigour. Sometimes doors open that one had forever thought were shut and sometimes new windows form that were never realized prior. I’m speaking in riddles and vagueness with intention; the lessons I learnt this week will probably be applied and will reoccur many many times in my optimistically, long life. They will be learned and relearned and when I’m sixty I’ll have some stories of that time i was 22 years old and lived in a studio apartment and felt like the most independent and self-sufficient Indian, woman in the world in the cleanest, greenest, fairest government in the world, receiving great treatment from decently functioning healthcare system.

Khaled Hosseini wrote that we all want extraordinary things to happen to us; we all want our life to be the exception to what the natural trend of the population and state of affairs is. Obviously there is a lot of struggle and suffering to reaching whatever our goals and dreams are, but we always earnestly hope things will work out. I became very frustrated at the lack of understanding and isolate myself. I fought harder and more passionately, and became stronger and more accepting to change than I ever was.

I realized that I’m not sensitive to people and their unneeded thoughts; my intense sensitivity comes from the daily happenings of my life. I crawl into a ball and ponder and reflect and agonize beyond anything considered healthy. But in a way, by experiencing such emotions so strongly, I am able to let it go and move on with my life. I needed to go through the entire spectrum of bullshit to feel relief. And therefore, I waded continuously in this pool of frustrating want to be more, brimmed to the top with self-loathing and doubt and lack of faith. I managed to swim out of it most of the time, but I would collapse from time to time.

And I know that I love this repeated collapses and overcome. The game is exhausting and endless and tiresome but it is the only thing that makes me feel like a human being with a heart. The feeling of feeling everything too much, when the feeling is so much that I have to emotionally shut down. But, I’d rather play this exhausting game of life with the privileged card of hands I’ve been dealt with, then play no game, and have no cards.